Traits of great and the not so great bloggers

I am new to the blogosphere. That is in terms writing blog posts. However, as I tread my way through blogville, I have been discovering an old truth all over again.
This was pounded home vigorously by [Dale Carnegie][1] in his best selling book [How to Win Friends and Influence People][2].
That principle is, if you really want others to listen to you (in this case read your blog posts ;) )
You’ve gotta stop treating them as idiots. Now, I hear people saying “hah, no blogger treats their readers as idiots”. But, I’ve seen it happen on a lot of blogs.
Some bloggers just don’t give a damn about the readers, and they go on and on about how their new book has hit the book stores, How you can attend their new session
(and give them some money) etc,. The problem with these kind of bloggers is that they are consumed by their own self. To hell with these kinda bloggers.
The funny thing is they never succeed and wonder why their blog does not have as many subscribers as the blogs of so many successful bloggers.

And there are those other bloggers, the successful ones ([Phil Haack of haacked.com][2],
[Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com][4], [Scott Hanselman of hanselman.com][5] and others). It’s interesting to see what
these guys do differently. They just don’t take their readers for granted. They post
good content, which at the end of the day is any content which is gonna help the readers.
It doesn’t matter how trivial or how obvious the stuff written on the blog post is. This is what all the bloggers should aspire to do.
Do something positive which helps other people. And you know what, if you successfully do this; money,
success and glory are all just byproducts. You’ll get all of them as a frigging byproducts.

Let me wrap up the whole thing by quoting from one of my favorite books ([How to Win Friends and Influence People][6] by
[Dale Carnegie][7] emphasis is mine):

I spent an evening in the dressing
room of Howard Thurston the last time
he appeared on Broadway- Thurston was
the acknowledged dean of magicians.
For forty years he had traveled all
over the world, time and again,
creating illusions, mystifying
audiences, and making people gasp with
astonishment. More than 60 million
people had paid admission to his show,
and he had made almost $2 million in
profit.

I asked Mr. Thurston to tell me the
secret of his success. His schooling
certainly had nothing to do with it,
for he ran away from home as a small
boy, became a hobo, rode in boxcars,
slept in haystacks, begged his food
from door to door, and learned to read
by looking out of boxcars at signs
along the railway.

Did he have a superior knowledge of magic? No, he told me hundreds of
books had been written about
legerdemain and scores of people knew
as much about it as he did. But he had
two things that the others didn’t
have. First, he had the ability to put
his personality across the footlights.
He was a master showman. He knew human
nature. Everything he did, every
gesture, every intonation of his
voice, every lifting of an eyebrow had
been carefully rehearsed in advance,
and his actions were timed to split
seconds. But, in addition to that,
Thurston had a genuine interest in
people. He told me that many magicians
would look at the audience and say to
themselves,
Well, there is a bunch of suckers out there, a bunch of hicks; I’ll fool
them all right. But Thurston’s
method was totally different. He told
me that every time he went on stage he
said to himself: I am grateful
because these people come to see me,
They make it possible for me to make
my living in a very agreeable way. I’m
going to give them the very best I
possibly can. He declared he never
stepped in front of the footlights
without first saying to himself over
and over:
I love my audience. I love my audience. Ridiculous? Absurd? You
are privileged to think anything you
like. I am merely passing it on to you
without comment as a recipe used by
one of the most famous magicians of
all time.